Monday, August 25, 2014

The edited version of this blog is published on Express Tribune on October 27, 2014

The events taking place around us affect our feeling. Our feelings
affect our conversation during normal life.
In the last three weeks, major event of Azadi March is happening in
Pakistan. This event is affecting the feeling of average Pakistani on the road.
Being related to data mining and text mining field, I carried out a little
experiment to check out the feeling/sentiments of Pakistani journalists who are
reporting the current event in Pakistan. I took the journalists as test case
because people listen to them and are affected by their feelings.

Twitter data is
normally used for understanding the feelings of the people. Researchers in USA
have used twitter data to understand the feelings of the people during
Presidential election. To understand the feelings of the Pakistani journalists,
I used the Sentiment analysis technique on the tweets of the journalists from
the last three weeks. I used twitteR
library of R-software to extract the tweets and Datumbox twitter Sentiment
analysis API to rate the sentiment of each tweet as positive, negative and
neutral depending upon the context. I used the last three week tweets of Cyril
Almeida, Fahad Hussain, Fereeha, Hamid Mir, Iftikhar Ahmad, Jasmeen Manzoor,
Javed Chaudhry, Kashif Abbasi, Moeed Pirzada, Mushtaq Minhas, Rauf Kalasra,
Raza Rumi, Shahzeb Khanzada, and Talat Hussain for my experiment. Due to
limitation of time, I wasn’t able to conduct experiment on other journalists.

The results obtained from the experiment are very
interesting. Moeed Pirzada and Fahad Hussain sentiments are obtained as most
positive among all of their peers. Mushtaq Minhas appears up as the one who
tops in negative sentiment. For neutral sentiments, Hamid Mir tops the group.
Not only his neutral sentiments were on the top but positive and negative
sentiments were too low that it appears that he can hide his feelings more than
among his peers. Similar is the case with Iftikhar Ahmad, Rauf Kalasra, and
Shahzeb Khanzada. Amount of positive sentiments remains higher than negative
for Fahad Hussain, Hamid Mir, Jasmeen Manzoor, Javed Chaudhry, Moeed Pirzada, and
Raza Rumi. Cyril Almeida, Fereeha, Jasmeen Manzoor, and Kashif Abbasi try to
balance their sentiments in their tweets as a result their neutral sentiments
remains lower than their positive and negative sentiment. Mushtaq Minhaz
neutral sentiments were also lower than positive and negative but that is due
to the fact that most of his sentiments were judged as negative. Cyril Almeida,
Fereeha, Kashif Abbasi, Mushtaq Minhas, Rauf Kalasra, and Talat Husain comes up
as the journalist who are spreading negative sentiments using their tweets. The
results of the sentiment analysis are shown in Table 1 and Figure 1.

In the future, if I will get time, I will conduct an
experiment to read the sentiments of the people replying to these journalists
to understand how much affect people are taking from the sentiments of these
journalists. How they are replying back on getting the implicit sentiment from
journalists in their tweets. Till then kindly reply back to me that do you
agree with the Datumbox twitter sentiment analysis engine results about the sentiments of the
journalists or not?